I have found myself wandering around muttering to myself as I work out a plot. I know where I want the characters to go, but they sit stubbornly on their asses refusing to move. It can take ages to mine their backstories and interactions to find reasonable motivations for doing what I want them to do--and sometimes there isn't one. I guess it's a sort of calculus, you modify the variables until the answer makes sense, and sometimes you find that the answer your solving for is not the one you expected.

I wish there was a way to say how to do it, but sometimes it's just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks in an appealing way.

About the only thing I've found that helps is keeping an eye out for stories in the real world and seeing how events lead to events. The real world is weirder than what you can get away with in fiction, but sometimes the memory of an occurrence can give you an idea for moving characters around.

There are very few new stories in the world, human motivations are pretty consistent through history, and most of them are fairly banal. That's part of the appeal, we recognize ourselves in the characters and don't feel so bad when the people we're reading about do the same stupid stuff we do.

I get that. I think it's just a weird me thing, that I feel like the whole plot should come to me whole, or it's ... cheating, or something.

Oh, god, the sense of cheating! I know that. "If I was any good at this, I'd already know what I want to do here!"

I think every writer has that.

I was reading something earlier (somewhere on the internet) about how authors frequently do make it up as they go along. One cited a situation where, in a book that was nominated for at least one award, they flipped a coin to decide who would live at the end of a conflict.

So ... enjoy your creative process?

Anyone interested in trading betas? Because before I keep trying to pitch my novel, I think I need to know what readers think.

mmmmph I think i finished this book that has been trying to gut me from the inside. gah. (thx to Kat for some insights on things)

now i have to send it somewhere and I am filled with the do not wants.

ETA: sent it. Now dealing with other things. Pretending that it doesn't exist.

For one of my stories, I need a name for one of those rich-lady empowerment foundations, especially if you can think of one that could be an acronym.

Women's Organization for Real Life Dedication/Development, WORLD.

I was trying to think of something for BLOOM, but didn't think you wanted to be tied down to Boston or Boise or Brighton.

Those are both interesting, thanks.

I got yet another idea brewing, but I'm so backlogged already. I was thinking of a Sci-Fi first contact sort of story. I kind of favor hard sci-fi so no faster than light travel and minimal hand-wavy technology. So the alien race are virtual beings, they are, essentially, software. They travel between the stars by data transmission via quantum entanglement based communication. The trick is that communication hardware has to travel between the stars the hard way taking a couple thousand years per light year. Also communication is strictly one device to one device and both devices must be manufactured together. So a starship carries thousands of 'paired' devices.

Anyhow, such a starship arrived thousands of years ago and the aliens have been watching the Earth all that time, keeping silent and with minimal interaction. They are completely non-hostile. The Earth poses no threat and has no significant resources for a starfaring race except for biological life. Harvesting that resource is simply a matter of observation. The most important resource for this race is entertainment, and watching life develop without their interference is pure gold. Anything unpredictable is exceptionally valuable. Right now the Earth is a quasar of entertainment as they suck up every creative thing humans do.

However, there are concerns that humanity might be on a path toward destruction and factions have developed over what to do. Do they risk corrupting the quasar by interfering, or do they risk this well drying up? The story is about some initial probing, sending down an agent to quietly make contact with a select individual. The agent is a manufactured person containing a shard of one of the aliens hardwired into brain tissue. So the agent seems perfectly human both physically and in behavior (they've been watching us forever so they know how not to be awkward).

Conflict can be found among the factions, in the person being made contact with being convinced, and the agent trying to come to some conclusion about humanities chances.